Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir (7 page)

Heather laughed and said, “But I love your place in Muskoka! Wanna trade?”

Yeats thought about that but didn’t say anything. Then he went outside to play badminton with Elizabeth, followed by their dog, Jake. Jake was a Maltipoo, the cutest and happiest dog I’d ever met.

Heather made a couple of gin and tonics, which we took out to a rocky point. For a split second I thought,
She’s living my dream
. Then I let that go, not wanting to wallow in envy as we watched the sun go down into the ocean. Heather and I had been friends since we were eighteen, and I didn’t begrudge her seemingly paradisiacal life. I was grateful to be there.

“The kids are trying to play badminton.” Heather laughed. “It’s far too windy.”

“Jake wants to play, too,” I said, watching the dog run from Elizabeth to Yeats and back again. “They’re going to play with him instead.” The kids put down the rackets and Elizabeth picked up a stick to throw.

“What are you guys going to do in Tofino? Take surfing lessons?” Heather laughed again. She knew we wouldn’t be doing that.

“No. Whale-watching. Hiking. Maybe we’ll go birdwatching.”

“That’d be good. The last time we were there we went whale-watching and saw a whole pod of humpbacks. It was spectacular. I didn’t even get seasick in the boat.”

“I guess you’ll never move back to Ontario?”

“Are you kidding me? Not in a million years. This coast is home. When we were away sailing in the Caribbean, Elizabeth was homesick for the cool weather. She really missed the rain and fog and everything else. I guess I did, too. You know, big cedars and stuff.”

“Giant slugs.”

“And the eagles.”

“Don’t they have eagle-like birds in the Caribbean?”

“It’s not the same. These are our eagles. Don’t you feel the same way about where you live?”

“Muskoka, yes. Toronto, not as much. But I’d really miss Muskoka if I moved back here. I know I would. I’d probably die of it, somewhere inside. One of those little deaths that add up, day by day, into something unbearable. The rocks, the lake, the pines. Yeah, you’re right, I feel the same way.”

We had five glorious days on De Courcy — hiking, swimming (I borrowed a wetsuit but Yeats went into the freezing Pacific without), boating, visiting Heather and Gord’s friends, eating and talking. This particular cloud nine came to a gentle end back at the marina, where Alex, another Vancouver Island friend, picked us up. She took us to her house in Nanaimo, a small city on the east coast of the island.

Alex and I had met when she worked at a children’s theatre company in Vancouver in the early
1980
s and I took a summer job there helping the business manager, Susan. Susan was also still a friend, but she lived in Calgary now.

Alex’s daughter, Breanna, was Danielle’s age. She was at home for the summer, working in the restaurant of a retirement home. She stood in the kitchen and ate a large tub of yogurt in one go.

She said, “Momma, let’s take them to Goats on Roof. I could get the day after tomorrow off.”

“Great idea, darlin’!” Alex said. “You guys will love Goats on Roof.”

“What is it?” Yeats asked.

Breanna said, “It’s a market with a grassy roof with goats on it, grazing. The market is really great and they have all these beautiful hanging decorations inside. They look like lanterns, but they’re not, just decorations. And they have every colour, some with little pieces of mirror in them. You’ll love them.”

Alex said, “You can buy them. They also have really yummy things to eat there, and lots of little shops selling groovy T-shirts and jewellery and things. It’s a fun place to wander, to window-shop.”

Yeats wasn’t big on shopping but he nodded. In fact, Yeats hated shopping, but he was too polite to protest out loud.

Goats on Roof was at Coombs, which is just north of Nanaimo. The market was built in the
1970
s by a couple who had immigrated to Canada from Norway. They used a traditional Norwegian construction style, building the market right into a slope and putting sod on the roof for insulation. Once it was built, they thought,
I wonder what would happen if we put goats on the roof to eat all this grass?
What happened was, it turned into a huge tourist attraction. The goats grazed happily and the market was fantastic, offering high quality food, kitchenware, and toys.

We ended up buying one of those colourful hanging decorations for each of Yeats’s cousins, plus a couple for ourselves. I’d have liked to fill a whole room with them, hang them from every possible nook and cranny, and pretend I lived inside a hippie-nomad tent.

Alex and I spent some good time visiting while Yeats worked on their computer in the basement. He was putting together a collage of photos from the train trip.

The topic of home came up with this old friend, too. She asked if I’d ever move back to the coast. I shook my head.

“I don’t think so anymore. I think I’m settled in the Canadian Shield,” I said.

When I left Vancouver in
1985
, I thought I’d go back. I thought I was returning to Ontario temporarily; but then I met Ben and we had Yeats. Although I wouldn’t have called myself stuck in Toronto, whenever I travelled back to BC, I was reminded that it, too, was home.

“Oh, that’s too bad. I want you out here. Ron wants to move somewhere even smaller than Nanaimo. Maybe Powell River.” Ron was Alex’s partner.

“What about you?” I asked her.

“If I move from Nanaimo, I think I’d like to go back to Vancouver. Breanna will be going to school there, probably
UBC
. But I don’t think I’ll be leaving here. I’m so settled. The thought of moving somewhere even quieter than here . . .”

“Remember we used to talk about when we’re old? Really old. And a group of us women moving into a house together and looking after one another, once all our men are gone?” We laughed.

“Here, on the West Coast,” Alex reminded me.

“Right. Well, I guess I can’t count that out completely. It might still be in my future.”

“I’ll hold on to that thought, sweetie.”

THE NEXT DAY ALEX
dropped us off at the rental car office. Yeats and I drove across the island from Nanaimo to Tofino, stopping briefly at Cathedral Grove to see the trees. Cathedral Grove is part of MacMillan Provincial Park and is home to a stand of endangered, ancient Douglas firs and red cedars. Some of the firs are eight hundred years old and the largest is more than nine metres in circumference. These trees are huge and tall and do create a cathedral-like atmosphere, but instead of immense stone pillars and high arched ceilings, the visitor is awed by these living objects reaching for the sky.

We walked around this surreal forest, following the trails with their ubiquitous signs reminding visitors to stay on the path. Yeats said, “It doesn’t feel real. These trees, you can’t see the tops of them. And there are no birds.”

“No birds? Maybe there are birds and we just can’t see them. Maybe if we stand still and listen, we’ll be able to hear them.”

“There are too many people. We’ll never hear them.” He was right. There were way too many other people — laughing and whining children, people shouting to one another when they found an even bigger tree “over here!” It was a cacophony.

We left shortly after and drove to the Pacific Ocean, one stunning view after another. Central Vancouver Island is mountainous and dotted with lakes, and the road follows the contours of all this natural beauty. We rounded a bend to see mountain peaks in the distance and then another bend to see a row of hills across a sparkling blue lake. I had to keep my eyes on the road, but luckily we were stuck behind some slowpoke camper vans, so I had time to look at the view. While Yeats scanned the sky for birds, I thought about the conversations I’d had with my girlfriends about where I belong.

My heart was torn in two.

We checked into Middle Beach Lodge in Pacific Rim National Park, on the very westernmost edge of Canada. The lodge was a ten-minute drive south from the town of Tofino and was perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean. From our window we looked out to a few small islands, which formed a breakwater for waves rolling in from an open sea. Beyond those islands, the next stop was Japan. I stood on our balcony above black rocks dropping in jags down to the shore, and felt the wind take my breath away. I had a feeling that this place could cure just about anything.

I took a look at the brochures I had picked up in the lobby.

I said, “Yeats, how about some birdwatching?”

I waved the brochure around. It had a black-and-white drawing of a
tufted puffin
on it.

He said, “Sure.”

And that was the start of that.

GEORGE THE BIRDWATCHER PICKED
us up at seven o’clock the next morning. He rolled down the window of his van and said, “Are you Lynn and son?” His cap was pushed back on his head and I guessed he was in his mid-sixties, his face well weathered from hours spent outside. I climbed into the front seat and Yeats into the back.

I said, “George, this is Yeats,” and they shook hands between me. George did not offer me his hand.

He said, “Have you seen any birds here yet? Where do you bird-watch at home? What are your best birds?”

The whole time he was looking at Yeats in the rear-view mirror. He continued asking Yeats questions as we left the lodge and drove down the Pacific Rim Highway. Yeats gave mumbling, half-hearted answers but George was not deterred. He didn’t look at me once.

In fact, for the whole morning, unless I asked him a direct question, George completely ignored me. Perhaps he sensed that Yeats was the “real” birder, or perhaps he was beyond thrilled to be given the opportunity to instruct a teenaged birdwatcher. I decided not to take it personally, not to see it as a slight on me or on women in general or on women nearing fifty in particular. I decided to blend into the background and enjoy the fantastic scenery.

We parked at a trailhead and George started talking about bird books. As we got out of the car, he told us (well, Yeats) that he preferred the Peterson guides because in those books you had many variations of the same bird on one page. “You see the adult male and female, adults in winter if they look different, juveniles, and so on. There are also pages in the Peterson where you get many warblers or sparrows together so you don’t have to turn ten pages to find the one you’re looking for when you’re trying to identify a bird in the field.”

He demonstrated this by opening his book.

He said to Yeats, “I always teach my students to use Peterson.” He walked beside Yeats, stood in front of me, and gestured to the guidebook. I peeked over George’s shoulder and saw a page filled with warblers.

George said, “See these? Colour bars. Look at the colour bars on the wings, look for eye rings. Look for any distinguishing marks like that. Say them to yourself and then look at the book.”

Yeats nodded and slipped me a glance. I smiled.

By now we were standing in front of a large expanse of deciduous trees. Yeats was looking around and George continued on, saying, “Once you get to know some birds, study their movements.”

Yeats said, “There’s one!” and lifted his binoculars. “I think it’s a goldfinch.”

George looked up as the bird flew deeper into the trees. He looked back down mumbling, “Good sighting.” He said, “You’ll get to know the birds by the way they move, how they hop or fly between branches, how they bob and weave.”

“There’s another,” Yeats said.

George and Yeats looked through their binoculars at the trees, and I looked at them.

George said, “It’s a
Townsend’s warbler
. Nice sighting. See the colour pattern. Memorize that and then look at this page.”

Before Yeats looked down at the book, he spied another bird. George sighed and they identified a Wilson’s warbler.

“You’re good,” George said to Yeats. He didn’t look at me. Maybe I wasn’t there anymore.

The Townsend’s warbler is a bird of the Pacific Northwest. It’s a small black-and-yellow songbird with white wing bars. It winters in Mexico, where it eats, almost exclusively, the honeydew-producing scale insect — and it will vigorously defend its dining territory from other birds.

The Wilson’s warbler is a small bird whose underparts are all yellow. The male, which we’d found here, has a black cap, and its nearly orange face is common in the western version. They are plentiful on Vancouver Island; we would go on to see many.

George gave a little lecture on recognizing birds by their voices, about memorizing their calls. Yeats listened to all these instructions but mostly he was watching for birds. George was too, but in a less pointed way. I had the feeling that George wanted to impart as much birding wisdom as he could to the younger generation as quickly as possible.

We walked down a seaside path and George talked about his younger days as a birder, how he and a couple of buddies used to skip school to look for birds. He was even more of a bird fanatic than Yeats. I looked at my son, who rolled his eyes. I could tell he wished George would be quiet and just show us some birds we’d never seen before.

We scrambled down to a beach strewn with boulders and giant logs. The sun was beginning to warm the air, but I kept my jacket zipped to my neck against the wind. Out beyond a small island, cormorants flew low to the water; two bald eagles turned in the clear sky high above us.

George set up his tripod, wedging it between the rocks. He turned the scope onto the small island and said, “Sometimes there are shorebirds over there. They’re so perfectly camouflaged that you need a scope to see them.”

Sure enough, he found a
short-billed dowitcher
, and we took turns looking at it through the scope as it pecked the ground, feeding.

The dowitcher is a medium-sized shorebird with a bill twice the length of its head. Its feathers are mottled browns and white, so it blends in with sand and rock and sky. To me its bill didn’t look short at all, but the bird guide assured us that compared to the long-billed dowitcher’s, it was short.

We watched the bird for a while and it seemed totally unaware of us. This was the first time we’d watched a bird through a scope. It was better than our binoculars because it was steadier and the magnification was greater. No matter how still you are, your binoculars will shake a bit, which can be annoying when you’re trying to see the details of a new bird. (Are those black and white stripes on its wings, or is it a grey patch? Can’t tell because my hands are shaking a teeny-weeny bit.) Also, the scope’s greater magnification allowed us to see more detail at a farther distance — those gradations of colour along the wings, or that subtle shading around the eyes.